Clouds of Collaboration
Interview with Juha Huuskonen
by Trebor Scholz (draft, Oct 23, 2003)
Juha Huuskonen is an Helsinki-based artist, software designer, educator and
cultural networker focusing on work in which collaboration is an essential
part of the process and result.
JH: I am part of a cloud of organizations, groups, and collectives operating
underneath the working title ©¯Very Interactive Institute.©˜ We have a small
working and meeting space in the center of Helsinki and most of us are
locals. ©¯Very Interactive Institute©˜ is composed of a non-profit
organization called Piknik Frequency, a production company Olento,
pixelACHE- DIY electronic art festival and Amfibio video performance
collective. ©¯Very Interactive Institute©˜ has a core group of 15-20 people
and an undefined amount of people involved in one or more of the
organizational units.
In the current cloud structure we have several organizational structures and
identities, which allows us to move more freely. I feel that this is better
than just having one name and identity that has to contain all different
ideas and forms of working. We also have more flexibility in finding funding
- we have a company interface to the corporate world, and a non-profit
interface to public funding.
In addition to all these initiatives I run my own domain juhuu.nu, which is
and will remain as my own personal playground. As an individual I©ˆm my own
side project.
This year one of my major projects is RAM 4 | Survival Kit workshop,
organized by Olento. The goal of the workshop is to think of what a survival
kit for the current media and communications environment would look like.
The idea is to focus at media and technology from the point of view of an
individual or a community, and think of the possibilities and the
bottlenecks. We will be thinking about this topic in a very broad sense,
possible topics for discussion include freedom of speech, corporate power,
open source software, digital divide and the idea of finding a better life
by abandoning technologies.
From 1998-2001 I put a lot of effort into starting the katastro.fi media
art collective. I was also involved in the founding of Avanto - Helsinki
Media Art festival, a festival of experimental electronic music. From
1994-1996 I was a member of a small group called Usva, which was organizing
electronic music events. During these years this was quite rare thing to do.
Before that I belonged to different demo scene groups.
I'm mainly involved in the initial phases of setting up initiatives and
organizations such as pixelache and katastro.fi My interest in
collaborations goes back to the demo scene of the late 80s, early 90s. The
term Demo Scene was coined back then to refer to demos in
real time: somebody programmed spectacular visual effects, somebody else
developed the music and everybody was really young, ages 10 to 20. I got
into programming visuals at the age of 12. The demo scene at the time was
very occupied with a teenage fashion, with peer respect as the motivating
force, peer competition. We all had aliases and exchanged software, mostly
sending disks to each via regular mail as the Internet was not available
yet.
People mostly wanted to get games, and someone had to break the copy
protection of the game in order to make the game available to the community.
People started to add little pieces of programming with sound and music,
with the name of the person and the group responsible for cracking the game.
At some point these intros started to become more and more important, and a
thing called demo was born. Demo is a linear show, containing graphics,
music and programming done by members of a certain demo group. The goal is
to come up with something new, which no one had done before, which was easy
with earlier computers because they were so limited but at the same time
offered a lot of possibilities of misusing the hardware in order to create
something unexpected.
We spent lots of time on the phone in these collaborations and send each
other lots and lots and lots of floppy disks in the mail. Two or three times
per year we met at so called copy parties were code was exchanged,
peer2peer. This tradition still lives on with one of those parties just
having taken place here in Helsinki- ASSEMBLY a few days ago. About 5000
geeks met in a stadium that was kept dark and all you saw were the screens
of all those thousands of laptops, all swapping code and software.
More recently I became involved in academic, media arts, commercial and
electronic music projects and scenes. For the past ten years I was involved
in initializing organizations and projects. I've mostly been involved in a
point, which is very challenging but also very easy in some aspects. The
challenge is to make things move, get people together and find something
that everybody agrees on and feels capable of dedicating to. After this
point the main goal is to get something done, and people are willing to make
compromises to reach that goal. Things get more challenging if this first
project becomes a success, and there is a need to organize things for the
future. People start thinking about money, who gets to decide what... I©ˆve
tried to promote a way of distributing this power in proportion to the
responsibilities that people take on. This way of working works well in a
cultural context where money is sparse. Therefore more power in decision
making equals more work and time spent on the project. The completely open
group decision making process can work in the beginning (when you just want
to make the first move) but this does not work later on.
We try to keep the organizational process open as long as possible. instead
of having one central meeting we do a lot of communication via email which
is available for a larger group of people. We try to avoid people getting
too overly protective of their own area of expertise or their own ideas and
encourage an atmosphere of a big sand box where we all play.
TS: How do negotiate the hierarchy within your collaborations? The German
media theorist Christoph Spehr talks of collective capital to which
participants contribute with technical skills, ideas, or cultural capital.
This creates a hierarchy in the evaluation of labor. Some labor is valued
more than other, and the work some may even become invisible. How do you
address this?
JH: Yes, I definitely see this problem. Our partial answer to this is that
we always question our roles. i often put together a meeting where a lot of
basic principles can be challenged. This works pretty well internally, but
does not always work so well when dealing with outside partners and
organizations. For example mainstream media are quite keen to pick one
individual to represent a group.
TS: How do see the online offline aspects of your projects?
JH: The online environment has a lot of positive aspect, but is not
sufficient on it's own for me: I'm more of an offline person. I would not
want to do a project where people don't meet face to face on a regular
basis. However, online community can make a big impact: we use the net
mainly as communication tool, as tool to organize our physical meetings. We
are interested in promoting our Finish Vjs and artists. We are mainly
interested in organizing physical links and personal links. That is what we
believe in rather than the creation of fame, which does not sustain
collaborations.
Links:
Piknik http://www.piknik.org/
pixelAche http://pixelACHE.org/new2/hki/home.php
Amfibio http://www.amfibio.org/
Olento http://www.olento.fi/
Juhuu http://juhuu.nu/
RAM 4 Survival Workshop http://www.olento.fi/ram4/
Media Art Collective Katastro.fi http://katastro.fi/
Avanto Media Festival http://www.avantofestival.com/
ASSEMBLY 2003
http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2003/07/30/finlands_massive_assembly
.html